The financial world is rapidly evolving, and at the center of this transformation is a new paradigm: agentic payments. As artificial intelligence continues to advance, machines and digital agents are beginning to make decisions—and transactions—on behalf of humans. This shift isn’t about incremental change; it’s about a complete rethinking of how value is exchanged in an increasingly autonomous economy. From digital wallets controlled by AI to bots negotiating purchases in real time, the future of finance is being shaped not by people, but by the intelligent agents acting for them.

This isn’t science fiction—it’s already beginning. And its impact on banking, identity, and the role of money itself will be profound.

Machines Will Need Money Too

One of the most compelling observations raised in recent thought leadership discussions is that if machines are going to act independently on our behalf—whether it’s booking flights, ordering groceries, or managing savings—they’ll also need access to funds. But traditional financial systems weren’t designed with machine-to-machine (M2M) transactions in mind.

Central bank digital currencies (CBDCs), stablecoins, and programmable money are all contenders to serve as the “digital cash” for machines. In fact, German banks—hardly known for radical innovation—have acknowledged the need for machine-specific digital money. This isn’t hypothetical. Experiments are already underway in supply chain management and industrial IoT environments.

Know Your Agent: Identity in the Machine Economy

If bots and AI agents are going to manage payments, open accounts, or even make investment decisions, we’ll need a new form of identity verification. Traditional Know Your Customer (KYC) models won’t cut it.

Instead, we’ll need systems designed for Know Your Agent (KYA). Financial institutions will have to verify not only who owns a given AI, but also what it is authorized to do. Can it make a payment? Is it limited to certain types of purchases? Does it have spending limits?

This level of granularity in permissions and identity management will require robust digital ID infrastructure—likely combining cryptography, zero-knowledge proofs, and smart contracts to ensure trust and control.

Agentic Payments and the End of Loyalty as We Know It

Imagine a bot tasked with choosing the best credit card to use at checkout. A human might consider brand loyalty, points, or habit. The bot, however, will purely optimize for value—be it cashback, fees, or promotional benefits. It won’t care if you’ve been with a bank for 20 years or if a card is endorsed by a celebrity.

For businesses, this raises a critical question: how do you market to bots?

Brands will need to rethink customer acquisition strategies. The future won’t be about emotional appeal. It will be about building trustworthy APIs, offering machine-readable rewards, and ensuring uptime and responsiveness. Bots won’t be wooed by jingles or sponsorships. They’ll be looking at real-time data, costs, and functionality.

New Payments Infrastructure for a New Era

The current payment rails—ACH, SWIFT, Visa, MasterCard—were built decades ago. Back then, compute power and bandwidth were expensive. So, systems were designed to separate authentication from transaction details to minimize data transfer.

But today, that limitation no longer exists. With modern telecoms and computing power, there’s no reason why every payment can’t carry full transaction context, including identity and permissions. That’s where digital wallets, stablecoins, and programmable money come into play.

This next-gen infrastructure won’t just facilitate payments—it will enable real-time, intelligent decision-making at the transaction level. And that will completely change the way commerce operates.

Autonomous Agents as Financial Customers

In this new world, non-human customers will outnumber human ones. AI agents will open accounts, manage subscriptions, negotiate terms, and even earn revenue. Legal and economic systems will eventually need to assign these agents some form of legal personhood, not because they’re “real people,” but because it will be more efficient.

Once bots can hold wallets and execute smart contracts independently, the implications are enormous. They’ll need secure storage for cryptographic keys, permissions models, and compliance frameworks—just like human users.

Rethinking Value in a Post-Money World

As automation and AI scale across industries, we may reach a point where traditional money loses relevance. In highly autonomous societies, value could be exchanged directly between assets without ever converting to fiat.

This concept—tokenized value exchange—means your AI might trade a digital train ticket, some unused compute cycles, and access to a solar microgrid to pay for a hotel room. All of this could happen instantly and without human involvement. The intermediary role of money, as we know it, could begin to fade.

Financial Literacy: Letting AI Do the Heavy Lifting

Today’s financial systems assume users must learn how to budget, choose savings accounts, and understand credit scores. But what if that model is outdated?

Financial literacy campaigns haven’t significantly improved outcomes. Instead, a shift toward financial automation—bots optimizing your spending, refinancing your loans, and selecting the best offers—could deliver better results for most people. Why try to train millions of people to make perfect financial choices when AI can do it better, faster, and more reliably?

What Happens When Bots Make Mistakes?

Autonomous systems are not infallible. So, a future filled with AI-led financial decisions will require mechanisms to handle errors. Imagine a bot making an accidental purchase or being tricked by a deepfake API. Systems must support rollbacks, dispute resolution, and some form of insurance or error correction—likely through smart contract design or digital rights management frameworks.

These guardrails will be crucial to maintaining trust in agentic payments.

Universal Basic Income and the Evolving Role of Work

Looking further ahead, as AI begins to handle not only commerce but also healthcare, education, and logistics, many predict a rise in universal basic income (UBI). The idea is that with high levels of automation, fewer people will need to work full-time jobs to meet basic needs.

But this doesn’t mean money disappears entirely. People may still work for luxury, choice, and personal fulfillment. Yet, the systems managing UBI—distribution, tracking, and optimization—will almost certainly be run by AI.

The Role of Experience and the Decline of Asset Obsession

As younger generations shift away from asset accumulation toward experience-driven lifestyles, AI will help manage “life as a service.” Instead of owning homes, cars, or appliances, people may rely on subscription-based access to transportation, housing, and tools.

In this context, bots will make micro-payments, schedule services, and optimize costs. The role of banks, as institutions that once held assets and enabled transactions, may evolve into infrastructure providers or custodians for fleets of machine clients.